Chapter 2
The knot of the Trigeda-Skaikru alliance ought to have tightened with the promise of a common enemy. The Maunon, who pickled her people and drank their blood, who hollowed them to empty carcasses and forced into them a gluttony for human flesh. But the Trigedakru were born insatiably angry; it was the meat of their survival. Blood must have blood, they said, but We must have blood, they meant.
Lexa they could not touch, for Lexa was sheathed in the skin of a god, with geysers seated beneath flesh. They could not reach the Maunon yet, but Clarke they could sink their teeth into, for her anxious, mouse-like appearance gave them leave.
She’d known Quint kom Trikru since she was fourteen and he’d gifted her a spear on her name-day. He claimed it had been fashioned from the tooth of a river-shark, with a point that could slice skin like it was parchment and snap bone like it was rotten bark. He’d taught her how to hold it, adjusted her grip by the elbow, taught her how to aim and throw until she turned dizzy and cross-eyed. He’d gifted her a barrel of honey-wine as a token of his reverence and Lexa had spent the night, to Anya’s great dismay, bounced between the company of these hardened, hulking warriors, speaking with meat between their teeth of battle and hope within their hearts of home.
She knew him. She knew his grief, she knew them all. They were a burden etched finely into her spine, ruthless, jagged marks veining her from the outside. She carried them with every silent step. Quint knew this. Quint tested her twenty years.
He said to Clarke, eyes narrowed and voice a rasp, You are the enemy. There was a fog that sat upon his shoulders. Lexa’s sheathed knife was hot against her hip.
Clarke stiffened like a stone. There was a soft petulance streaking her inhale, that of someone who did not take kindly to contradiction. Lexa couldn’t decide whether this made her childish or dangerous.
Clarke’s blue eyes were slits. Dangerous, Lexa decided, the back of her neck aprickle. I’m sorry, was said evenly, have I done something to offend you?
Quint was harsh. Yes. You burnt my brother alive in a ring of fire.
If Clarke blanched, it did not show. She was no wilting flower. She may have been ragged as a roughspun rug, but this was not due to tetherlessness. Clarke was calloused, and Lexa yearned to swallow the blisters on her skin. She stepped forward, voice a knife picking between the yellow of Quint’s teeth, He shouldn’t have attacked my ship.
Lexa felt something dormant in her uncoil. There. There. The snarl Clarke hid behind her speech, anointed and flowery as the crown of Lexa’s head on Conclave Day. The beast with gored, lamp-red eyes that tickled the stalk of her throat. There was a catch to Clarke’s voice.
You’re very brave under the Commander’s protection, Quint said. He looked like an animal in a cage.
Lexa had no patience for cagefights. She raised her hand. Enough.
Dealing with men like Quint was like rolling a rock up an unforgiving hill. To roll it would be to sacrifice her hands, and Lexa had no wish for pain. It had no place in her wounded heart. Quin tested the tightrope of her patience. First, he challenged her, though it was fine for he had brought her the river-shark spear. Second, he went against her command and sought out further quarrel with Clarke, though this too she could brush aside for he’d gifted her the honey-wine.
Third, his quarrel with Clarke was a blood-debt he intended to pay. Lexa would not abide the blood of allies on her hands, and he paid for this treason with a knife through the wrist. Fourth, he’d killed the woman of Clarke’s guard. And Lexa thought, Blood must have blood, even if Clarke did not understand this yet. She said, The kill is yours, Clarke, and Clarke looked at her with such wide eyes Lexa wondered if she’d ever understood her at all.
In the distance, there was a howl that brushed over the tips of Lexa’s ears, and an ash travelled from crown to toe. The trees beside her extended like lovers reaching for the sky, impaling its soft underbelly in the late light. But now they seemed more frantic, as though attempting to unroot themselves from poisonous earth. Like there was something— something—
What is that?
Lexa was still. Pauna.
And for this fifth sin of leading them into the bars of the beast’s enclosure, Lexa channelled Costia’s cold, smooth hands and her hot, coal-bright scalpel, and slashed the tether to Quint’s left leg. His honey-wine tasted sour in her mouth. He crumbled like a heap of sand, gargling blood and earthy resin onto the ground.
Instinct, the child nursed by hardship, kicked at the back of her heel. Lexa turned to Clarke, eyes black as neutron stars, and yelled out — Run!
They found the feeding ground. In a feat of weakness, an absurdity her kin could not perform, Lexa had fallen, cut herself like bait. She told Clarke, all noble strength in mind, all festering weakness in body, to leave. It would not have been the most humiliating death a Commander suffered.
But Clarke said — No way!
And prised Lexa from the jaws of one death, only for the teeth of another to clasp her neck like it was a chew-toy. Clarke bit her lip like it was a petal veined in pink-and-red, Lexa thought of another day she’d touched flowers into the ground, and an itch sliced its way into her mouth.
Clarke could not stomach looking at her. Lexa knew better than false hope. Distance could satiate her ache, she thought.
And then Clarke rode in, wild as a fire, hair unkempt and tangy with earth, eyes oiled like the tips of a spear, veiling a deep fearfulness that tugged at the nerves and dead-ends from behind the spool of gelatinous matter. Clarke rode in, aflame with fury that was hollow to Lexa, who was built like marrowless bone. Clarke rode in, the sunset colouring the tips of her hair pink and shadowing the full bow of her lip, her horse’s hooves athunder, turning the heads of villager and warrior alike, and said —
Can we talk in private?
She brought news of a foreign weapon. A missile, she called it. Lexa knew it from the legends, word-of-mouth claims of arms of destruction that dug a cherub-shaped hole into the earth, several corpses tall and several copses wide. Lexa allowed her eyes to fall shut, allowed the veil of imagination to fall; to picture yellow flames sizzling the flesh from her body, the chalk dust choking up her lungs, the rocks crushing like a snowfall, splintering her bone like it was a wooden seam. Lexa thought of this intensely. Clarke must have thought it too, with irreconcilable horror.
Some part of Lexa that was still twelve, that hadn’t yielded itself to the Flame, wished for Clarke to retract this information. Wished to be innocent of this knowledge. But Lexa knew it was her brunt to shoulder the day she refused to yield alongside Luna. There was now a snake-shaped fork in the road.
They could leave. The missile would make an elephant’s footprint in the earth, and the Maunon hawks would squint from their spy-glasses, and they’d think — What’s going on? And they’d comb their mountain with thin, vitamin-deficient fingers until they rooted out the intruders by their necks.
Or they could stay.
Clarke was of one mind. We have to start evacuating now.
Lexa was of another. She thought to herself, Forgive me, Costia, though bones had no grudges to hold and no forgivenesses to bear, and said, No.
The village died like a phoenix, smoked white ashes of raw fury in the air. They breathed, a people, a vessel, and blackness veined their lungs, felled them open like skin vaults. The hands of the people called for justice. Their fists raised in an outcry for vengeance. Jus drein jus daun. Lexa was pleased. (Clarke was unsettled.)
Clarke worried. It was endearing. It reminded Lexa of long, late nights rolling off the fingers of her memory like a spool of liquid light — late nights hidden in the amberstone lockets of Costia’s eyes, full, brown lips downturned and eyes overcast with fear. What if, she nagged, what if, what if. This, too, was endearing until it had gotten Costia killed. Lexa sobered.
Clarke spoke of her friend, Bellamy, in hushed tones like he was a secret to keep. I might be the one who gets him killed, she said with a round, fretful face.
Lexa soothed her like she soothed a cut. Without a mind to it, her index finger smoothed the lines of her charcoal worpaint weeping down her cheek. The finger came off her skin looking as though it had been cut, and Lexa countered, poised, That’s what it means to be a leader, Klark. The truth is, we must look into the eyes of our warriors and say, ‘Go die for me’.
And those who are not warriors too, Lexa didn’t say. She frowned. It was too late to be catching sentiment. It was too early for Clarke, of the Sky People, of the sunset blush, to face such truths. Soon enough, she thought with heavy regret.
Clarke appeared bewildered by her words. If only it were that easy.
Her confusion was honeysuckle to Lexa’s parched throat, the childlike mulishness awaking a chained flutter in her heart. Hope was the thing of feather in her chest, sliced by the iron bars of her ribs. Hope was not the routine blackening of the lungs. It was the offshoots that sprouted there, wild and carnivorous, that crept up her throat like insects, that crawled beneath her flesh, and that bled off her tongue as though it were a pink snake shedding a second skin. Love is weakness, she chided with a curled fist, To be Commander is to be alone.
You could be a leader your people look to, Lexa stated. It was not flattery. It was the maljointed weakness of truth. If she had room in her body left for shame, perhaps it might have flushed her cheeks as Costia’s affections had once done. The thought sent a knitting needle to her chest. Someone they would fight and die for.
If only, Lexa did not add. The boot of victory pressed firmly into the rawed back of sacrifice. If Clarke had not yet realised this—
I never asked for this, Clarke said in a breath. I’m just trying to keep us alive.
Clarke meant: I do what so many others twice my age refuse to do. Lexa sympathised with her. She’d learnt this lesson aged twelve, ink seeping into the crevices of her palm-lines.
You were born for this, Klark. Lexa said. Same as me.
Even the speaker was blind to the true weight of honesty veiled behind her words.
(Maybe life should be about more than just surviving. Don’t we deserve better than that?)
Indra had taught her the meanings of flowers when Lexa was a sapling herself. She had liked to pick them from the forests and place them in Lexa’s hair, where they would chafe against her skin and spill from her unruly tresses to the ground.
Narcissus, she’d pointed to a flower with a bright yellow suckling mouth crowned in white, tangled in an embrace with its neighbour. Happiness. Violet, the warrior’s fingers had curled around the stem with gentleness, plucking a lilac, kiss-shaped petal and allowing it to flutter to the ground. Love. Belladonna, she’d said with warning, shielding Lexa from the plant with teeth jewelling its neck and an eye at its centre, whole and unblinking like a bug. Death.
Clarke’s kiss tasted like the bruising of those childhood fields. It tasted like the incense of pollen tickling her throat, like a viny embrace had made a home in her. Like dew on a daffodil, like the pale, marish hide of a daisy, like the opium of tulip, reaching in red threads to weave addiction into her sclera. Like the tendrils of olden poetry Costia used to read, she thought of Clarke, O violet-crowned Aphrodite. Like the belladonna creeping into her pupil, devouring the milk-green of her eye.
(Maybe we do.)
Clarke pulled away. She could not be with Lexa. That was expected. Duty was a widow to love.
(Later that night, Lexa coughed flowers blue as melancholy, as the tears threatening to unspool the colour from Clarke’s eye. They were blackened only with her blood.)
Love is weakness, Titus resided as a devil on her shoulder. To be Commander is to be alone.
When Cage Wallace offered her the deal, Lexa grappled at it like it was a life-ring. (She had not begun drowning yet.)
*
The roars of her people spurred her like their drums. She was trained to react as a colt to battle, spear weightless like water in her hands. The people clamoured to see their Heda fight, even if she was roughspun, even if she did not quite yet possess the cordialities her predecessor had. The sand roiled beneath her feet. Indra’s mouth thinned into a whip.
She fought Lexa in an oval ditch, hollowed out like the egg-shaped inside of a nest, thinly lined by creaking, branched barriers that strained with the eagerness of the onlookers, each scrabbling to catch a glimpse. Of their newly-anointed Heda, silver rings trailing her hair and wildfire threatening to burn the paper of her eyelids. Of their gona, with skin hard as the leather of a war-drum and palms tough to shake as the jagged Blue Cliffs to climb. The people salivated as though this exercise were a five-course meal.
Lexa was sweating lightly. Aged thirteen, she’d acquired an oaky definition to her muscle she had lacked even two years prior, pale and anaemic. It was like the Flame wove sunlight into her skin as it had carved rigour into her spine, the cries of those childrens’ injustices weeping beneath the shroud of her tunic, white as the silver thing in the sky after which Luna was named.
Lexa vaulted across the oval with a coltish mirth. She lapped the praise up on the underside of her wanting tongue, sliding to her knees to evade Indra’s even stab. Dust leapt into her eyes, though it quelled the ache sitting low in her throat. Costia would not have approved of this. (She was always thinking of Costia, and for what, to what end—)
“Heda! Heda! Heda!” Indra’s nostrils subtly flared. Lexa did not blame her. It must have been a clot to the bleed of pride to be seen on the same footing as a child, even if that child was black of blood. Lexa swung her spear in a wide arc like it was a paintbrush, a feat begotten of laziness, not sloppiness. She wondered if Indra could tell the difference between the two as she caught Lexa’s spear against her own, pummeling it to the side.
Her knees were already mired in dirt, and her blood had begun pumping. Sessions like these were, to Lexa, the equivalent of bathing in high light, or perhaps painting, if the canvas was the earth and the paints could only be obtained from holes in her skin. Lexa could play. The people wanted her to play; they thirsted for a spectacle to parch their sand-dried throats. It was this, Lexa decided, Indra’s spear wiring into the mesh of skin at her palm, or it was somebody else’s softer, weaker flesh caught at a less controlled spearpoint. The oval was a sponge for lust.
When she had been one year past ten and one inch beneath Moira, she had struggled to lift a spear this size. Costia had worried, then. It didn’t anger Lexa — little angered Lexa — but it had crept beneath the modest stalks of her ego like a malignant insect. Now — she was both glad and fearful of Costia’s distance. She had claimed a faint stomach, which Lexa knew to be a lie, for Costia had shown her more cold bodies than Anya and Indra combined. No, Costia’s reasoning was more cryptic than that. But alas, Lexa could not unspool the contents of her skull, she could not pick at her cerebral matter like it was corn or bran, and Costia’s soft lip, bejewelled in candlelight, turned stiff as stone upon further questioning.
Sitting on the throne of the skyline was the Tower, serrated like an icicle cut into by frost, its wick gleaming with an orange flame. A second sun. A second throne resided there too, fashioned from the spines of the trees she had supposedly been born of and gnarled like the veins on an old man’s hand. It bruised her. Titus said bruises helped to learn.
But — ah, Lexa had grown distracted, and wistfulness was the wound in her hand, dripping in infection to the ground. The crowd blanched harder than she did, and Lexa held the inside of her cheeks hostage beneath her teeth. She swung her spear and feinted at Indra’s neck, only to strike her in the calf.
It was a shallow cut. Indra’s eyes narrowed, the shock not strong enough to sink a gona to her knees. She struck Lexa, who blocked her woodenly, twisted, and knocked the butt of her spear against Indra’s chin with a strength ripped from the roots of the earth. She felt the soil beneath her feet, moving, shifting like the tides, sun winking against her rippling back, and she felt strong. She was not just Heda in this thread of moment. She was a gona kom Trikru, destiny snatched with the same surety as the squalls from her infant throat.
Indra didn’t fall, she stuttered. Lexa was not at the age where she could make her fall. But it was enough. She reached, with the tenacity of a ground snake, and knocked her spear from her hand. It fell to the earth with a dull thunk, and the people roared in exhilaration that did not belong to them. Lexa wondered if it would have brought them an equal excitement to have seen her fall.
An ugly part of her wallowed in Indra’s defeat, wished to marry her back to the foot-kissed earth, to force her to choke back these sands as Lexa had done in what was not youth, but was more akin to shadow. When Lexa was goufa and natblida, when the tendrils of Heda could not touch her, let alone streak her face. Indra held no sorrow for her then. She held no sorrow for her now, only a stone respect. Lexa returned the stunted affection, and grasped sweet victory in a breath, allowed it to rot her throat, and expelled it in the day air.
Indra did not kneel, but nevertheless Lexa said, “Rise, gona,” and Indra’s eyes met with the sky. “You have fought well today.”
And, amidst the cheers building like the heat of war, amidst the cries slackened with lust lengthening their nostrils, the hunger that swept across them all, enough to make the pebbles of the earth shudder with its might — the call for blood that Lexa recognised, the call for hers, toxic, blackened, to fall onto the earth and turn it ashen and lifeless — amidst it all, she only heard the voice that didn’t speak. The yawning silence that opened a chasm in her throat, the lack of Costia that had her ack-acking on the weight of a finger, rawness dribbling from her mouth and a petal red, red like gouged flesh and a skinned fox, falling onto the ground syrupy with saliva and veined in black.
There was a tree, an oaken tree she’d climbed when seven, wilier than all the other trainees combined — they’d taunted her for this, coward, runner, though what did it matter, for they were all dead — and to this tree she’d tied a girl. This was a girl whose white flesh turned blue-and-brown, peeling from her body like the skin of a marsh-ma-llow, the gooey confectionary their scriptures talked of in The Before. Lexa beckoned her party into the gates, but she herself stayed, to unpick the decaying girl’s gummy lips, touch the only crown she’d ever wear. Her eyes were black with flies. There was a pendant with a silver cross tying her neck like a noose, and Lexa stroked it with her thumb. Unlike the rest of her, it was cold and hard.
In a matter of days, she would be too. She looked scared. It was a paternal instinct that reached to soothe her, though it was a warrior’s instinct that drove the spearpoint through her pink heart. (Neither. It was neither neither neither, it was both the sadness and the fury of a child who was no child, who hid vaults of things in her being, whose blood was poison and whose own heart was hollow as a rotten trunk of wood.)
Lexa pressed a shaky kiss to her forehead. “Yu gonplei ste odon,” she murmured the forgotten words. Then, she left.
The drums sounded in Anya’s welcome. She sat on horseback like a duke, game slung across her horse’s rump like a sack of grain. Her first braid ran down proudly to her chin, red hair ablaze and surly mouth raised in an uncommon smile. Lexa’s heart thrummed at the sight.
She wore the worpaint, wore black leathers that left her arms open, wore pants that buckled at the side. Her own braids were far more intricate than Anya’s — she lacked only one, the mark of a gona she would only achieve at sixteen. The rest spliced through her hair in stunted irregularities; the blessing of the Fleimkipa, the mark of the Pramheda, the anointing of the Heda, the braid of the natblida.
“Heja, Anya.”
Anya dismounted. “Heja, Heda.” Her eye twitched in acknowledgement of the procession swarming Lexa, at whose helm sat a burly, provincial man named Gustus. He spoke little.
“Did you hunt well?” Lexa enquired, gaze drawn in curiosity. Not quite so beatific as it might once have been; those blinds had been drawn long ago — Lexa’s awe faded as the blood of the boy Rawing kom Podakru sank into the famished soils, easing from his jugular into the earth. It faded with the light in the girl Natali kom Ouskejonkru’s face. It faded with the crack of Moira’s chest, with the stilling of her heart. But it did not mean a gentler curiosity did not still exist.
Anya grunted. “Sha, Heda.”
Lexa eyed her carefully. In measured tones, she said, “The blessing of Pramheda touches you. You are welcomed in her city walls.” Quieter, for Anya’s ears alone — “I expect you will not refuse your Second dinner tonight.”
“You are not well,” were Anya’s first words. She never had time for platitudes.
“‘Good evening, Lexa’, ‘How are you, Lexa’, ‘How lovely to see you, Lexa’,”
Anya sniffed. “Mockery is not the product of a strong mind.” she eyed the plate of steak-and-vegetables Lexa offered her guardedly.
“It’s not poison,” Lexa reassured. Had she not been tired to the bone, she might have felt something akin to offence at Anya’s suspicion. As it happened, she was so, so out of breath, she worried the skin on her chest might stitch itself to her ribs. She had drawn up a chair and a soft flame, bleeding yellow stitched onto the candleholder. It was one of Costia’s candles, scented lavender, and it made her throat constrict. Surreptitiously, she wiped her mouth.
Anya sat. “You are growing fast,” she commented, picking up a knife.
“I know.”
“You must fight well now, like a real gona.”
Lexa was quiet, lowering herself into the seat opposite Anya, Her four-poster curtained her at the shoulders. “I must.”
Anya had raised the knife to her mouth and was now chewing. She swallowed, food travelling down her throat in a knot, and her dark eyes narrowed, like oil-spills in the dim light. Anya was raised a hunter; she had the nose of a bloodhound — of course she could smell the gout in Lexa’s chest.
“Something unsettles you.”
“Nothing unsettles me,” said Lexa, tight as a swallow. “I am Heda. To be Commander is—”
“To be alone? To be unafraid?” Anya keened forth, sharp as the knife she delicately held in her left hand. It traipsed between her fingers as though she was handling a stalk or a quill. “Is that what Titus has been telling you? What of Costia?”
Lexa’s cheeks were blue, bruised with blush. She thought — of Costia, her long fingers that wandered in stitches, sharp knuckles that sounded like knitting needles when cracked. Costia, and her eyes that looked like trees broken open and weeping softly, the ropy tattoos rough to the touch, stapled into her skin. Costia and her full, brown lips and pleated, shock-white hair and heart-shaped face Lexa wished to pocket into the gaping hole within her heart where her own should have been.
Anya, hunter, smelled the bloodtrail, and a pleased look crossed her face. “Ah. So that is what has gotten the mighty Heda so riled up. A girl.”
Lexa didn’t meet her eyes. “You know what the people expect of me. I cannot go behind their backs. And Costia—” her posture slouched like the spine of a relic. “Costia would not want me.”
“With that attitude, no.” Anya said meanly. “You have been avoiding her.”
“She has been making me sick,” Lexa said truthfully. She was no fool. She knew what the petals in her throat meant.
“With what? Love?”
In answer, Lexa doubled over in a cough, thick, phlegmy petals rising from her thorax and sticking unpleasantly to the underside of her tongue. She stuck a finger into her mouth, unabashed, unashamed, and unslicked the petal from within. She held it up, its veiny, fleshy texture under scrutiny of the candlelight, orange as the sun on white paper. Anya’s eyes were medallions. She didn’t have to ask — she knew.
*
“A bounty,” Titus scoffed, his burgundy cape flapping like flabs of flesh. He kept talking with a chin raised like the palm of her classmasters, like she was not Heda and he only Fleimkipa. “You have gone against my express instruction and you place a bounty on the girl you are to forget. Hodnes laik kwelnes.”
“Hodnes laik kwelnes,” Lexa repeated, “and I am offended you would think my heart so coltish. I have no need for Klark. I need Wanheda, and you need to remember yourself, Fleimkipa.”
An array of conflicts passed through Titus’ face. He bowed curtly. “Sha, Heda.”
Hope,
Clarke’s head, her face, her heart-shaped face on whose smudged lips Lexa yearned to suckle, was covered in a sack. Her hands which had gripped the back of Lexa’s neck in lust were cordoned off like private property, her knees forced to a throne. She knelt to Lexa not of her own volition, and Lexa’s stomach churned.
is the thing with feathers
“I'm sorry it had to be this way.” Lexa apologised. She would have sunken herself into the mires of the Sangedakru for Clarke’s forgiveness. The flowers in her chest were proof of her withdrawal. “I had to ensure Wanheda didn't fall into the hands of the Ice Queen. War is brewing, Clarke. I need you.” she uttered from the iron-crusted depths of her chest, the hollow cavity filled with concrete and stuck to her skin like an animal’s carcass, swallowed by the grind of Clarke’s jaw. She needed her. Why didn’t Clarke understand? (Clarke could never know.)
That perches
She took the gag out of Clarke’s mouth, a rag soiled with sweat, spit and grime alike.
in the soul.
“You bitch!!” Clarke screamed, thrashing against her bindings as though she were afire. “You wanted the Commander of Death? You’ve got her! I’ll kill you!”
(Hope was the flower in her chest with a tongue at its centre, lapping up the ashes of her blackened lungs. Hope was the scalpel turning blood onto skin and bone onto blood, peeling her flesh like it was sellotape. Hope was Clarke’s spit touching her eye, and the petal furrying her mouth. She was going to die.)
*
She was fourteen. There was a palm resting against her phlegmy chest. Breathe, she thought, tears thickening against her cheeks like worpaint. She could not look Indra in the eyes.
Titus, kneeling, had covered his bald head with a hood, chin vibrating against her chest. He looked up, eyes silver-white like the outer layer of an egg. Lexa felt one crack down her back, fingers of it slicking her tunic to her skin. Titus was gaunt.
“You will die.”
Indra gasped in fury. Lexa didn’t move.
“How long?”
Titus raised himself, limbs unfolding as though he were a piece of cartilage to bend and stretch. Fleimkipas were like that. The more superstitious of the children she’d slain at the conclave had whispered of them in tones of mingled fear and awe; Fleimkipas were raised in the shadow, born of darkness and with a blindness in the eye. Beneath their robes they sported eight, hairy limbs and their feet were cut to waxy stubs, which was why Titus limped. They were born as arachnids, and beneath the veil of night they reverted to their true forms. The flame corrupted them, the children said, veined their skin with red, like the mongrel blood peasants carried on the inside, spilling out.
Titus was not like this. Titus was a long, gaunt face coloured in the pale of the moon. There was no space to hide eight limbs beneath his robes, and his veins were a deep green-and-purple, and Lexa knew this was the normal colour for Anya’s veins were that colour too. He was no anomaly, and therefore she was unafraid. No, the fear unfolding beneath her skin in hot flashes was—
“Years,” Titus said with gentleness, like the flower pricking at her heart. His palm, nails stubbed at the tip and enfolded in green lines, closed over her own. She shifted from him. The moon was not to touch the tides. “You have a strong body, Heda. But it will not fight off an infection like this.”
“And the cure?” Indra roughly said.
Titus’ voice shook, like his vocal cords were tightropes upholding barbells, the balls on the cleft of his chin sinking into the pale of his skin. “There is none.” Lexa’s eyes slipped shut. Titus continued, voice distant like a faraway prayer. “Hodnes laik kwlenes. We can only look to the skies and hope for a miracle recovery. For now, I shall send for a call for the new patch of natblidae. Grace be.”
Indra’s voice was thick as the undergrowth. “You will not send for anyone. I want no word of this to leave the Tower, do you hear?”
“As Fleimkipa, it is my sacred duty—”
Indra’s hands found his tunic, and balled it in her iron grip. He shrunk like a flame batted by a wind, eyes widened like brown marshes, building a hollow in his face. Indra’s tattoos textured her skin like bark, and now raised like teeth poised to tear the meat from his ivory bone. She held him with perfect poise, reigned in by righteous anger and militant discipline alike — her loyalty to Heda knew no bounds, and it made Lexa heavy in the stomach.
“As Fleimkipa, you have a duty to your Heda first.” Indra hissed. “All talks of weakness and illness will stay confined in these walls. I want your best Fisas to search for a cure, day and night, by light or blind — they will not rest, they will work until their hands are raw and hair is grey and feet bloated and blue, and they will thank Heda for the granted honour of servitude to her. They will work until they cure her, and if she dies upon their watch, I will take their heads — and yours — myself. Is this understood?”
“Gona Indra,” Titus stuttered, “this is highly irregular—”
And Indra whispered into his ear what she thought Lexa couldn’t hear. “She is a girl,” she said, voice strained as though it balanced the mountain of Lexa’s hardship with its handlessness. “She is only ten-and-four, and she has rallied Podakru, Trishanakru, Ouskejonkru, Boudalankru, Sangedakru and Delphikru under the bracket of the Coalition. For the first time in a hundred years, we have a Heda kom Kongeda, and it expands its arms every day. She is only ten-and-four, and beneath her skin lives the Flame, and in the air she breathes and the words she speaks the people see a hope. We are lapsed without her fire.”
“Be that as it may,” Titus was cool, wrenching Indra’s hands away from him. He cast a long shadow in the dank room, fingers twitching like the snout or tail of a rat. “The Flame is not the only thing in her skin. There is a tumour too, and unlike a tumour, the Flame may be carved out.”
With horror, Indra whispered, “It will kill her.”
Titus bowed his head. “Victory stands on the back of sacrifice. Grace be.”
Indra slapped him across the face, the tusks of her tattoos flickering in the low light. They appeared to sink into the meat of his cheek, painting it a warlike pink, like the innards of a carcass. “I will not let it be known that a child died because her Fleimkipa was too cautious. Summon your Fisas or, with Heda’s permission, it will be your lungs that will rupture by dawn.”
“Indra,” Lexa found her voice. Until that moment, she had not been aware she had lost it, content to listen. Both Titus’ and Indra’s eyes turned to her, each lined with hope. She felt a certain sadness knowing she must eviscerate it. There was no comfort she could offer. “Placate yourself. My foolishness is not the fault of Titus. I will carry this burden as I was born to do.”
And Indra’s tattoos no longer appeared tusks, now deepest blue like tears. Her eyes dimmed in fury and wept in shadow instead, tears wetting her skin. They were small, but unseemly, and like a warrior did not stoop to soothe a scratch, she did not stoop to wipe them from her cheek. “But,” her voice cracked like— like a splinter in the skin. “But you are a child.”
“Ai laik Heda,” Lexa softly said. “Chin up, Indra. Why are you so affected?”
Indra stepped forth, sought to conjoin her hand with Lexa’s own. Her gona’s calluses swallowed Lexa’s, fingers traipsing against fingers, knuckles touching like butterflies. Indra’s hand was warm, and she might have frozen upon brushing Lexa’s cooler skin. “Because you are cursed, Leksa,” replied Indra. “And you cannot be. Fortune has misshapen your path.”
“Breathe,” Lexa said. “You feel anger. It clouds you, so breathe. Allow its fumes to blacken your lungs.” she pulled her hand away. “I was always cursed. Open up my skin and you may see it for yourself, the true nature of my curse. But the courtesy to complain of that was never granted,” a vein of bitterness opened in her voice, the wound of childlike petulance she sought and bandaged with immediate grace, “so why should I be granted leeway to complain of this? I will live.”
“Your prognosis makes it abundantly clear that you will not,” corrected Titus.
Lexa shrugged. She amended her statement. “Then I shall not. My quarrels are with the flesh, not with time.”
“So what shall be done, Heda?” Titus avoided her eyes, robes falling like they had been drenched to the thread. “Shall we alert the people?”
“No,” Lexa said immediately. “Azgeda have been prying for weakness as of late. They must see only strength.” she thought a moment. “You will gather the Fisas and you will cut out their tongues. They will search for the tumour in my lungs, as Indra suggested, but for their failures they will not be punished, and neither will the Fleimkipa. All fault will be gone when I am gone, not them and not you, Titus.”
There appeared to be something in his throat, for Titus had difficulty swallowing. “You are wise, Heda.”
Lexa thought, You would be too, had you opened a throat when you were twelve, had you been groomed into diplomacy since you were eight, had you seen a man die when you were four, had you been torn from your mother’s hands when you were less, less, nothing, and grown knowing you were the cause of her death. Lexa said none of this aloud.
“I am tired.”
Indra coughed. “We will escort you into bed.”
(Lexa was fifteen when the trumpets sounded and Azgeda raised their banner, proclaiming they wished for war.)
*
Clarke held a blade to Lexa’s throat, and Lexa was sorry. She said so. “I never meant to turn you into this.”
There was pain and fury written in Clarke’s gaze. She was the Ship of Theseus, who outside of the sterile conditions of the Ark had gone rotten, had re-metabolised, had quenched the fire in her eyes and then relit it — and Lexa did not know at whom she looked, at what. The age-old question niggled at her again; Is the Ship of Theseus still the Ship of Theseus if each component has been replaced, slowly yet fundamentally?
The answer, Lexa found, as her neck wept, was in the brackets of yes and no. She knew, for this was a face smooth of youth and hard of calluses, like a stone in the river, not yet charred by moss. Lexa had fallen in love with the fingers whose beds were soft like petals, whose eyes were downturned like a pout that creased that brow — she had fallen in love with Costia, who had worn Clarke’s face. It ought to have relieved her, knowing these two individuals were no longer the same.
But. But it was still Clarke, and Lexa’s heart still pumped with fury, and so she pushed herself closer to the bite of the blade. End me, she was too coward to beg. End me, take me, reap me, anything but— the pain that arced through ligament of bone, that tore into her flesh like the bite of a manticore, the invisible griffon that sat atop her and dedicated itself to gouging her eyes into red circles, the eagle that gorged itself upon her liver. Lexa wanted to twist in her torture, the damp scent of sweat cloying to her nose.
Clarke did not feel the same. Clarke was stuck in the net of a separate conflict, hands shaking not from premonition but from simple fear, as though she were treading stones in a riverbed and was only afraid to fall. Love is weakness. Not for Clarke, to whom love was the slip of a knife between the ribs.
Lexa licked her lips, cracked and burnt and charred from the fire lit like a white-hot stove in her chest. She was going to die, but Clarke did not have to die with her.
“You’re free to go,” she said roughly. “Your mother is here. I will have you escorted to her.”
Something shifted in Clarke’s face. A ripple beneath the skin of her innocence, beneath which a shadow of something more conniving lurked, like a snake bunching the corners of her eyes. Lexa could not decide if it impressed or maddened her.
Clarke lowered the knife, still wary, though she should not have been. Lexa could have disembowelled her on the spot even with the knife to her neck. Clarke could not catch up with the hound of deep-seated childhood trauma and the pistons it had trained her reflexes to be.
“Wait.” she said. “I have a better idea.”
Black paint encircling her eyes like glittering thorns, Clarke’s eyes looked to be studded gemstones in a hilt. Her knees married to the floor, though the pride did not bleed from her spine. Her eyes, sapphire like the beads Titus wore under his cloak, plain as the shifting skies above, thick as the currents running through the woods, met Lexa’s and did not part.
“Rise,” Lexa said. Like her place was the floor, Clarke stayed shackled. Then, only then, as though paying no deference to Lexa’s command, she rose with languidity, hair spun gold in the candle-light. There was a tusk choking Lexa’s throat.
And— later— it was Lexa who fell to her knees, iron-and-leather of her garment chafing against her skin. She raised her gaze, softened by the low light of Costia’s memory, her gifted candles scenting the room, and it fell on Clarke, overshadowed by the thorn of her throne raising a shadow to her back. Lexa’s heart thrummed from pain and anticipation, and she spoke the softly-laced words:
“I swear fealty to you, Klark kom Skaikru.” she whispered. “I vow to treat your needs as my own, and your people as my people.”
It was enough. (For now.)
Nia challenged her, as though she were a boot to Lexa’s authority. Oh, but she had driven a knife through Lexa’s heart once and mended its broken shutters, so Lexa had forgiven her. But now her motives were plainer than death. (She did wonder how that felt like, to be scooped into the arms of the ether. She hoped death was a little like falling asleep. Sue her, like a child she too was a coward to the threat of pain.)
You are challenged, hissed Nia.
I accept your challenge. The truth of the matter was, Lexa was tired. There was an ache beneath her chest covered by the most meagre tarpaulin of her skin. Part of her, the bitter, festering part, almost hoped Nia would win — the part of her that yearned to spit in the face of the Kongeda, who said and said and said Love is weakness but who’d never proved their own strength. The part of her that yearned to martyr herself to a sword and not to flesh; Lexa was a born warrior, she must die as one. She must. The legacy flowed in her blood.
Warrior against warrior to the death, Titus droned, stiff as a board. Queen Nia of Azgeda, who do you choose to be your champion?
The snake did not bare her teeth, for snakes had none, but her tongue flicked out as though to catch Lexa’s stutter or fear. Lexa was immobile. My son Roan, she cut the syllables like a hunter would slice meat, Prince of Azgeda. As though he had not been a cageling under her and Lexa’s shared custody.
Titus turned to her. Heda, who will fight for you?
Costia’s candles smoldered the flames in her eyes. Lavender smoke touched her nose, paired with the boasting waft of decay. She could not tell if it was hers or Nia’s — if, as she settled on her knife-tipped throne, it was her back that was to be sliced open by her shields. Perhaps, Lexa thought, resting her arms delicately at the edges of her seat. She met Clarke’s eyes, which pleaded. Lexa shook her head a fraction of an inch. No. It is not time, she thought. Aloud, she said—
Ai laik Heda. Non na throu daun gon ai.
Clarke’s mouth fell open without a sound. Lexa did not notice, but her eyes were dark.
Clarke’s worry was vinegar to the wound. It was offensive to Lexa’s tongue, to the radiation eating at her chest. She wished to appease her anxiety.
Clarke, this is Aden. For Clarke was anxious for her people, not the cuts on Lexa’s skin. If Lexa fell, the conclave would be held at dawn, and Aden would muddy his happy hands as she had once done and swear fealty to Wanheda as she too had done.
Aden is the most promising of my novitiates, Lexa explained. If I should die today, he will likely succeed me.
When Clarke appeared unappeased, Lexa prompted Aden.Tell her what will happen to Clarke’s people when you become Heda, Aden.
Duteously, he recited the words Lexa wished him to recite. If I become Heda, I pledge my loyalty to the 13th Clan.
She sent him off, and fixed Clarke with a look. See? Nothing to worry about.
Clarke bared her teeth. You don’t stand a chance against Roan.
Had Lexa had wings, her feathers would have ruffled with offence. Had she wanted to, she would have skewered that rat with ease. Clarke’s discontent was a usurpation to her pride. Not that she had much to salvage, the bruise in her chest bleeding slowly outward, dulling her sense of step. Still, she was compelled to defend herself. You have never seen me fight.
There was a flicker of something. It was gone, because Clarke did not love her. No, but I saw him kill three men in the time it took for the first one to hit the ground.
And still, Lexa’s spirit, sunken into the bow of her neck, inclined to soothe her, though Clarke was not the one in pain. If you’re right, then today’s the day my spirit will choose its successor, and you need to accept that.
(But it was not. Lexa hunched over the earth, entrails of her sick dribbling from her mouth, mixing with the blood-paint dripping from her eyes. But it was not. Lexa stood over Roan’s prone body, mouth smeared with blood, thinking of the girl whose crowned teeth she had reddened too, whose chest she’d punctured like an iceberg to a hull. But it was not. Lexa threw the spear, and Nia fell back, skin splitting like the clap of a war-drum. But it was not. The Queen is dead, long live the King.)